Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities

Ethnic wars, transnational concerns for human rights, the Internet, financial crises, multinational corporations, international
trade, and more generally, globalization have given rise to the sentiment that
sovereignty as it has been conventionally understood is eroding or even withering away. This conclusion has been reached without much sense of the
extent to which the present is different from the past, and without much
systematic thought about how the concept of sovereignty might be understood
and how the rules of sovereignty have actually functioned in the international
environment.

Many recent discussions about the status of sovereignty have addressed
economic questions—especially the possible loss of state regulatory capacity.
However, this volume addresses different and possibly more consequential
issues: namely, the way in which basic rules regarding mutual recognition
and the exclusion of external authority, what are termed in this study international legal sovereignty and Westphalian sovereignty, are influencing, facilitating, or impeding the resolution of difficult political and economic issues. The rules associated with sovereignty, like any set of rules, may be more
or less functional—more or less able to facilitate the realization of political,
economic, security, or ideological objectives that are pursued by actors. The
conventional rules of sovereignty—that is, to recognize juridically independent territorial entities and exclude external sources of authority from domestic territory—have been widely recognized at least since the early part of
the nineteenth century. These rules, which originated in Europe, have spread

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